


Your Light

by squirenonny



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: 31 Days of Sadfic, CFSWF, Multi, Possible Character Death, WoR spoilers, You Decide, idek what pairing to tag this as, is it platonic? is it an ot3? is it the ot4 with kaladin sadly not present for the sadness?, it started as shallarin and then adolin appeared
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:33:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shallan really should have been paying better attention. (Now she'll never know who put the poison in Adolin's wine.)</p><p>Written for CFSWF 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Light

Shallan should have seen. There must have been a clue somewhere—in the server who brought the wine, in one of the lighteyes or ardents or staff weaving between tables, in the tension that had hung over Urithiru since Sadeas’s death. No one knew who had killed the Highprince, so no one knew who would be next.

Shallan should have been watching the crowd instead of Renarin. Should have had her mind on potential assassins instead of on drawing out one of the younger prince’s rare smiles. With Kaladin gone to find his family, Shallan had to be extra vigilant.

Instead, she’d let the flutter of her heart sweep her away until Adolin, chatting with some of Sebarial’s officers nearby, collapsed.

“Poison.”

The word fell from numb lips as Shallan dropped beside Adolin. She was no surgeon, but that hardly mattered. The tremor in his hands, the bluish tinge to his lips, the way his eyes struggled to focus on her, all testified to poison in the wine now pooling around him.

Renarin leaned over Adolin, skin steaming with Stormlight. He pressed a shaking hand to Adolin’s forehead and breathed out. The Light dimmed, spreading from Renarin’s fingertips across Adolin’s skin.

Adolin shivered, and then the light faded. If possible, he looked even paler than before.

“I—I can’t—” Renarin lifted his hand, shaking his head. His eyes glowed white, making his wide-eyed stare more pronounced. “I’ve hardly practiced Regrowth. I…I don’t know what to do.”

 _Try!_ Shallan swallowed the command. It would do no good to yell at him. Shock may have made his face a mask of calm, but the look in his eyes was enough to prove that he was as scared as her. More. As close as Shallan and Adolin were, he was Renarin’s brother.

“Does Glys know anything?” she asked.

“I don’t even know if Regrowth works on poison.”

“ _Does Glys know anything?_ ” She held her emotions in a steel grip, her voice low and gentle. She _would not_ cry.

Adolin swallowed, ran his tongue over gray lips. Orange painspren wriggled up from the ground around him.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Renarin shook his head. “He can’t remember. I don’t know enough!”

Shallan brushed her fingers along his sleeve. “It’s not your fault,” she said. _If only Kaladin were here_. Never mind that even if Kaladin, by some miracle, recognized the poison, he might not have the antidote. _If only Jasnah were still alive._

_Jasnah._

Shallan’s back straightened, her breath leaving her in a hiss. Renarin didn’t look away from his brother, but she felt his attention on her as she fumbled in her safehand pouch for a garnet broam. Jasnah had said this needed a garnet. Because fabrial Soulcasters needed them? Or because Radiants did?

She didn’t know enough. For all she’d practiced with illusions, she’d put off studying Soulcasting. It had always reminded her too much of Jasnah, and her few paltry attempts frustrated her too much to keep on.

But now Adolin was dying, and unless Shallan figured out how to Soulcast poison into blood, the way Jasnah had done for her in Kharbranth…

Her eyes found Renarin, clasping Adolin’s hand to his chest. If Shallan failed, Renarin would blame himself for Adolin’s death.

“I have an idea,” Shallan said. She rested her freehand on Adolin’s forehead, grimacing at the clammy feel of his skin. He rolled his eyes toward her and tried for a smile that became a grimace of pain. “This is going to hurt.” _A lot._ Shallan held onto the memory of the fire beneath her skin; it was all she knew about this process.

She didn’t tell him that it might not work. That she was feeling her way along, grasping at spren. She _would_ do this. For Adolin, and for Renarin.

Shallan stepped halfway into Shadesmar. That much she _had_ mastered. A sea of spheres below her, two flames hovering before her. There were others beyond—Bridge Four, and Shallan’s guards; those who had not run for help when Adolin collapsed.

She held a sphere in her hand. The poison. Its awareness felt faint, slick, on the verge of vanishing. Dimly, Shallan wondered if that was because it was inside Adolin. At what point was poison no longer a separate entity?

No time for that. Adolin’s flame flickered, scarcely half the size of Renarin’s.

Shallan’s fingers curled around the sphere. “You will become blood.”

Pattern buzzed behind her. “No.”

She waited for more, but it did not come. Fear skittered around the edges of her mind, in the shifting shadows around her. _I need more._ She had to convince the poison to change, but what did it want? _To kill._

No, there was more to it than that. Predators used venom to paralyze and to kill, but prey? Plants? They used poison as a defense. But how to know which it was? What if it wasn’t a natural poison at all?

No time. She had to try. She had to choose. “You want to defend.”

A moment’s silence. “I defend,” Pattern agreed.

Shallan breathed a tiny sigh of relief. “Where you came from, you defended life.”

“Yes.”

“If something attacked, you destroyed it, to defend life.”

“Yes.”

“But now you’re here.” Shallan held the sphere out between finger and thumb, held it out to Adolin’s dimming light so the flame seemed to burn within the sphere. “ _This_ is your life now. You are part of him now. You defend him now.”

Doubts thundered in Shallan’s head—it was a weak argument with Adolin’s life on the line—but she didn’t let them show on her face or in her voice. _Authority._ That was the key. In politics, in illusion, in Soulcasting. She would not bend.

Pattern hummed. “I…kill.”

“ _No_.” Shallan willed her Stormlight into the poison sphere. “You defend. You defend _Adolin_.”

“I…I defend.”

“Good. So change.”

“N-no.” The poison, through Pattern, sounded uncertain now.

Shallan gathered her Stormlight. “You _will_ be blood.”

The poison resisted, but Shallan refused to yield. Light poured from her into the sphere and it began to change. But not all of it, and not fast enough. Adolin’s light flickered. His agonized cries in the Physical Realm echoed in her ears as she fed more Light to the poison, holding firmly to the image of blood. An image like she would use for an illusion, but here in Shadesmar it carried more weight.

_Blood._

Stormlight winked out. Shallan toppled, fell into the sea of spheres. Fighting to stay afloat, she threw herself back into her body—or tried to. Without Light, she only succeeded in turning herself over in the crush of spheres.

“Bad,” Pattern said. “This is bad.”

“I know it’s bad!” She reached out toward the lights. Adolin’s, brighter now—had it actually _worked_? (Please, Almighty, let it have worked.) And Renarin’s. She could have sworn it was moving toward her. “How do I get back? Pattern?”

A buzzing was her only answer. The spheres shifted, dragging her down, as monstrous spren—the huge, winged shapes she recognized as exhaustionspren and others she couldn’t put a name to—came to investigate. Pattern’s arms caught her, held her above the surface.

“Pattern?” Shaking, from cold and from dread, Shallan twisted in Pattern’s grip. Renarin. Adolin. Why was Pattern taking her away from them? “Pattern, I need to go back. I have to--”

“You cannot.”

* * *

 

Shallan drifted.

Pattern kept her afloat as the lights of Urithiru faded, dragged her to an island in the sea of spheres. It might have been a lake in the Physical Realm, but she couldn’t say where. Shadesmar had no recognizable landmarks. She might have come one mile, or ten, or a hundred.

At least she could still summon Pattern as a Blade, once she no longer needed him to hold her up. She found one of Shadesmar’s crystalline trees and made a crude raft.

Pattern said he could not take her home. Not without Stormlight and maybe not with it either. _It is not a thing of Lightweavers,_ he told her. _You should not be here like this._ He could say no more, with his memory still full of holes.

It was the holes that gave Shallan hope. Just because Pattern didn’t remember a way back to the Physical Realm didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

So she wandered, drifting on the sea, hiking across solid ground. She fought off spren, when she had to, and searched out human cities and towns, the largest visible from miles away as clouds of flickering lights.

If there was a way to recognize individual minds from Shadesmar, Shallan didn’t know it. Except…

It was probably wishful thinking. Shallan had little sense of direction in Shadesmar, but she thought she had come a long way from Urithiru. It was exceedingly improbable.

Even so, there was one time, floating across the sea of spheres, that she swore she could sense Renarin. His light was no different than all the others, but it called to her. She had Pattern push her closer so she could reach out to his light.

The flames didn’t burn in Shadesmar. They were warm, and they carried a dim awareness, much like that of the spheres. From this one, she sensed sadness, and longing. It could have been anyone.

She knew it was Renarin.

 _I’m coming,_ she thought, hands cupped around his flame. Could he sense her from the Physical Realm? Not likely, but it was a comforting thought. There were other lights clustered around Renarin. Some of them had to be members of Bridge Four. One of them might have been Adolin, though she doubted it. They didn't feel familiar.

(She allowed herself to wonder, for a moment, what that meant. She could have sword his flame had stablilized, all those days--weeks? months?--ago. Maybe she had been lying to herself. She was so very good at that.)

Her raft began to drift, carried on the currents in the spheres. Shallan cried out, reaching out for Renarin’s light.

“I’ll find my way back!” she called as his flame slipped beyond her reach. Pattern settled onto the raft, humming in displeasure. Loud noises attracted spren. They weren’t all dangerous here, but enough were. Shallan dropped her voice to a whisper. “I’ll come back, someday. You both had better be waiting for me.”


End file.
